On Thin Ice

Chapter Three: Against the Boards

Riley · Week Two · Practice

She heard him before she saw him. That was the thing about Jax on the ice — you could track him by the sound of his edges, clean and precise, no wasted stride, a rhythm so consistent she'd started registering it the way you registered your own heartbeat. Present, even when you stopped listening for it.

Tuesday's practice had been running for forty minutes when he pulled her out of a forechecking drill. Not publicly, the way he'd corrected her in week one. He simply appeared at her shoulder between reps and said, "Your hips are opening too early on the backhand," and kept skating toward the far boards.

She followed because she had no other option.

He stopped at the boards where the ice curved near the goal line, away from the main flow of the drill. The rest of the team ran their reps behind them. He set up in position facing the boards and said, "Come here," with the complete absence of self-consciousness of a person who had been instructing people on this ice for two years and had run out of space for anything other than directness.

She came to stand in front of him. He looked at her for a moment — not in any particular way, just the assessing look she was used to — and then he moved behind her.

His hands settled on her hips.

Not tentative. Not careful. The matter-of-fact grip of a captain adjusting a player's positioning, which was exactly what it was, which was exactly what she needed to remember while he spoke low and even beside her ear and walked her through the mechanics of the backhand entry.

"You're reading the defender and compensating early," he said. "Your weight shifts here—" his right hand pressed slightly at her hip, indicating the movement "—before you've committed to the direction. It telegraphs. Any defenseman worth his position reads it in your first stride and shuts the lane." His chest was close — not touching, but she was aware of his body behind hers with a specificity that had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with the fact that she was a twenty-year-old woman being held still by Jackson Calloway's hands in an empty corner of the ice. "You need to hold neutral longer. Commit late. Make him guess."

"Commit late," she repeated. Her voice came out steady. She was unreasonably proud of it.

"Hold the weight here." The pressure of his hands shifted — both of them now, steadying her hips in a neutral position, and she was very aware of her binder doing its job and the two layers beneath her jersey and the specific deliberateness with which she was not thinking about the warmth radiating off his body. "Feel the difference?"

"Yes," she said.

A pause. His hands hadn't moved. The drill behind them ran on — the sound of blades and pucks and Briggs calling corrections — and in the small private space of this corner of the ice, the pause lasted three seconds longer than it needed to, and she felt him register that, felt the slight tension that moved through his hands before he stepped back.

"Run it," he said.

She ran it. Held neutral until the last possible moment, committed hard at the cut, came out of the sequence a full step faster than her previous reps. She pulled up at the boards and turned around.

He was already skating back toward the main drill. His jaw was set in a way she was beginning to recognise — that particular tightness that appeared, she'd noticed, when something had happened that he was in the process of not examining. She'd seen it twice before. Once after the first stance correction in practice. Once after she'd hit the high-slot sequence and he'd gone still on the far side of the ice.

She didn't know yet what it meant. She knew it wasn't nothing.

* * *

After practice, she stood at the boards drinking water and watching the team clear the ice in the easy, loud way of people who had known each other long enough to be careless. Marco Dias was doing something with his stick that was technically a trick shot and practically a liability, and Torres was telling him so at volume. Two defensemen were arguing about something that had happened in the third drill. Normal. Warm. She was on the outside of all of it, which was fine. Necessary. She didn't need to be inside it.

Then Marco spotted her and skated over with the absolute confidence of someone who had never once considered the possibility that his company wasn't welcome.

"Ward." He stopped beside her and knocked her shoulder with his. "You did that backhand drill better than Kowalski's been doing it all season. Don't tell him I said that."

She looked at him. He had a wide, easy smile and eyes that paid attention in a way she was going to need to watch. "I won't," she said.

"I'm Marco." He extended a gloved hand like they hadn't been on the same ice for two weeks. "Formally. Since Jax hasn't bothered."

"I know who you are."

He grinned. "Everybody does. It's a blessing and a burden." He tilted his head, studying her in the frank, friendly way of someone who was used to reading people and enjoyed it. "You're quiet. Not shy-quiet, but More like—" he paused, searching. "Like you're conserving something."

She said nothing.

"See that," he pointed at her. "That's what I mean." But he was smiling when he said it, not pressing, and she felt the particular danger of him – not the threat kind, the other kind. The kind where someone is genuinely warm, and you have to work to stay on guard, and the work starts to feel exhausting, and then it starts to feel unnecessary, and that was the road to getting caught.

"Team dinner Thursday," he said. "You should come."

"Maybe," she said.

"That's a yes with extra steps." He knocked her shoulder again and skated off, and she heard him say something to Torres that made Torres laugh. She stood at the boards in the emptying arena and allowed herself, very briefly, to feel how much she wanted things to be simple.

They weren't. They couldn't be. She knew that.

She skated toward the gate, and as she passed the corridor to the coaches' office, she heard two voices – Briggs and Calloway, door open, the conversation not meant for the hallway but audible anyway.

"He's picking up the system faster than I expected," Briggs said.

A silence. Then Jax: "He's a liability." The same word. The same flat delivery. But there was something different in it this time — not the certainty of week one. something that sat more like a question, trying to sound like a statement. "He's small. He favours his backhand. There are gaps."

"He covered every gap today."

Another silence. Longer.

"Well, he did," Jax said. And then nothing else.

Riley stood in the hallway and breathed. Then she walked out into the cold and turned her face up to the grey October sky and held the word 'liability' in her mouth and thought about what it was going to take to make him stop believing it.

Whatever it was, she was going to need more of it.